The Habit of Art

I like to think this is what K and I both have, but in an active, positive sense, not in the passive, resigned sense that W.H. Auden expresses in Alan Bennett's excellent new play at the National Theatre... which we saw on Thursday night - at the cinema!

The National Theatre have been running a new initiative with their last few productions, called NT Live, whereby live performances are beamed into cinemas around the country and around the world. We were slightly wary of the idea - the magic of the theatre surely comes largely from being there, with all the electricity generated by the living interaction of the actors with each other and with the audience - but we really wanted to see the play, and were having problems finding any available Travelex £10 tickets (somehow these all just evaporate the moment they are released for sale - I am sure there is a way of playing the system, but I haven't figured out what it is yet) and didn't fancy bankrupting ourselves for a seat in the gods...

So partly out of defeat and partly out of curiosity for this newfangled technology we booked tickets to see The Habit of Art down the road at the Ritzy. And it was absolutely brilliant!! There was no less a buzz as we all waited through the countdown for the performance to begin, and rather than the fixed view of the stage which I imagined would be what we saw, we had an absolutely privileged view of the action from a variety of camera angles. It was often very close in to the actors, so you didn't quite get the sense of set which you do when you're at the theatre itself, though the cameras did give wide shots of the stage at the beginning and during the interval. The strangest thing was the interval, when the cameras turned on the audience, and there were we, another audience, watching them, but they couldn't see us... Slightly bizarre.

But the play itself was fantastic!! So so funny and poignant at the same time. I hadn't realised it was a play within a play - perhaps I had read this, but forgot - but effectively the play is a cast of actors rehearsing a new play about Auden and Benjamin Britten, and an imagined encounter between them soon before their deaths, after decades of estrangement. I loved the sense of theatre - so to speak - and how theatre works which was encapsulated within the 'rehearsal' bits, where the play moves out from the intimate focus on Auden, to comment self-referentially on the play itself, on the National itself, on the whole process of making art, how it's the work that counts and what lives on... Really really excellent. Another classic from Bennett, who really is a master of his game.

There were students in the cinema (some annoying ones, who left after about 10 minutes), including a girl sitting behind K taking notes. I loved how this initiative made the theatre so accessible. As a schoolgirl and student I used to get cheap standing tickets at the National, and just lap up the performances - Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, with Felicity Kendal, really sticks in my memory for being a moment when I awakened to how wonderful the theatre was - and this idea of beaming plays into cinemas makes that available to people who can't afford the National's prices, or who live a long long way from where these landmark productions are happening... The list of international venues which broadcast The Habit of Art last Thursday was long in all senses of the word!

London Assurance is the next one, another play we have been having difficulty getting affordable tickets for. Can't wait!